First is the federal rescue of General Motors and Chrysler; Romney opposed it, which suggests
this rewrite of the 1975
New York Daily News headline when Gerald Ford refused the city a bailout: “Romney to Ohio:
Drop Dead.”

Second is the claim by a couple Republican rustics running for the Senate in Missouri and
Indiana that, as to sexual assaults on women, they, as men, know better than any woman what’s what
when pregnancies result.

Third is the brazen bid by some Republicans to hold down voting by black Ohioans — which had
exactly the opposite effect. Brilliant strategy, guys.

In counterpoint, if Obama wins Ohio, he’ll do so despite two factors. The first is his Health
and Human Services Department’s attempt to bully Catholic institutions over contraception and
abortion. In effect, HHS wants to force the church to rewrite its beliefs to appeal to the crowd.
After all, that’s what politicians do every day, isn’t it?

According to America’s Catholic bishops, Vice President Joe Biden didn’t know what he was
talking about — there’s a shock — when he said, debating Republican vice presidential candidate
Paul Ryan, that the church-HHS fight was just a big misunderstanding.

Actually, said the bishops, unless the Obama administration backs off, Catholic institutions “
will still be forced to provide their employees with health coverage … (which) will still have to
include sterilization, contraception and abortifacients.” (The National Library of Medicine says
one example of an abortifacient — an abortion-inducing drug — is mifepristone, once called
RU-486.)

The second “despite this” factor in an Obama victory in Ohio is the injustice done to Ohioans
(people elsewhere, too) who are salaried retirees from Delphi, once GM’s auto-parts arm. The auto
rescue should have protected the pensions of all Delphi retirees. But it didn’t. If a Delphi
retiree was an hourly employee and belonged to the United Auto Workers, International Union of
Electrical Workers or United Steelworkers, his or her pension was “topped up” to match what GM or
Delphi promised before they went broke. But pensions of Delphi’s salaried retirees didn’t get
topped up (nor, it appears, did those of some hourly Delphi retirees who had belonged to other
unions).

Mary Miller, of suburban Dayton, a board member of the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association,
said the group estimates that about 5,000 Ohioans are Delphi salaried retirees. Many live in the
Dayton, Columbus and Youngstown-Warren (“Packard Electric”) areas. (According to the
Youngstown Vindicator, about 1,500 salaried Packard-Delphi retirees call Youngstown-Warren
home.)

Taxpayers’ money rescued GM. GM then made deals with unions or Delphi to protect some Delphi
retirees’ pensions — not all. It doesn’t matter now whether, as some Republicans claim, Obama aides
wanted to hold down bailout costs while simultaneously — slick maneuver — wooing labor by favoring
union retirees.

Ohioans have heard a lifetime of debating points, and don’t need more. They just want government
to be fair. What the administration let happen to Delphi’s salaried retirees was anything but.

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes
from Ohio University.